84. The Mattering Instinct with Rebecca Goldstein

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"We are creatures of matter who long to matter — and one of the strongest manifestations of this is people who deny that we are matter."

Professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow whose books include The Mind-Body Problem, Incompleteness, Betraying Spinoza, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (a work of fiction). In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama and has been named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. She joins us to discuss her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, and will be the keynote speaker at the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa this August.

Topics we cover

✔︎ What the mattering instinct is, where it comes from, and why it may be the defining feature of our species
 ✔︎ The four locations on the mattering map — transcenders, communal materers, heroic strivers, and competitors — and what they reveal about human motivation
 ✔︎ Why public debates about religion so often fail — and what understanding mattering tells us about how to talk across belief divides

Connect with Rebecca and find out more

• The Mattering Instinct: https://www.rebeccagoldstein.com/books/the-mattering-instinct
• Rebecca's website: https://www.rebeccagoldstein.com
• World Humanist Congress, Ottawa, August 2026: https://humanists.international/world-humanist-congress

Transcript

Welcome Rebecca Goldstein

James Hogson 0:01

Welcome to Humanism Now, a podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassion. I'm your host, James Hodgson. My guest today is Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow. She's the author of books including The Mind-Body Problem, Incompleteness, Betraying Spinoza, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, and she's been named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. Rebecca will also be the keynote speaker at the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa this August. And I'm delighted to welcome her ahead of that conference to discuss her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. A book about what it means to matter and why that need shapes so much of our human lives. Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to Humanism Now.

Rebecca Goldstein 0:52

Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I ought to just add that book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God had a subtitle, which was a work of fiction.

James Hogson 1:04

Yes, probably best for this audience to clarify that.

Rebecca Goldstein 1:08

It was really interesting when I was on book tour with that. When I went down south in the US, that subtitle was in How It and I would get the true believers, and it led to some very interesting dialogue, actually.

James Hogson 1:24

Yeah, well, I would imagine a book titled That Way Around is more likely to get intrigue than the other way around, perhaps. But the latest book is about mattering, and it's a fantastic, brilliant work that I would recommend to all humanists, certainly. There's so much in there. But I'd be fascinated to know about the genesis of this book. How do you even start to approach addressing a concept as broad and as deep as mattering?

Rebecca Goldstein 1:53

I really had to ease into it because you know my background is in analytic philosophy and particularly philosophy of science, philosophy of math. And those who have been trained in analytic philosophy tend to like problems that can be analyzed and very precisely. And so, as you say, this is very broad, it's very existential. That's

Why tackle mattering

Rebecca Goldstein 2:20

just not the way I had been trained or was inclined to go, certainly in my early philosophical career. But I do this thing of occasionally writing novels. And it's a form I I love. I love to read them and I very much enjoy writing them. And in my very first novel, which was called The Mind-Body Problem, and that's of course a classic problem in philosophy of mind, now call it the heart problem of consciousness. I had this character, and the editor who had acquired it had asked me in our first conversation, I don't understand your main character. She's very attractive, she's very sexually desirable. That gets a lot of the pluck going. She's she's very bright, she's very funny, she's so unhappy. She's always teetering on the cusp of despair. Why? And it's true, I felt that about her. Her very the very first line she spoke to me out of the blue was, I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius. And I knew this was a character, then and I wrote the novel to find out who this was. But that was a very discontented voice. And I thought about it for weeks on end, and then I decided, oh, she doesn't feel like she matters. Yes, she's very attractive. Yes, she's very bright. And yes, that could be happening in my house at any moment. Yes, she is um, you know, funny and all that, but that's not what most matters to her, you know, what most matters to her is something else. And so it sort of glommed onto her in her life in the strange way you are when you write a novel. You're not quite yourself, you're half this character. We sort of collaborated and she came up with this idea of the mattering map, that there are different ways that we try to prove to ourselves that we matter. And had she inhabited a location where being very seductive and having any man you want mattered to her, most mattered to her, she'd be content. But that's not where she resided. And that just seemed interesting to me, but I put it away, published the novel, put it away, got back to my real work, and other academics, other writers started to take up this notion of the mattering map. A behavioral economist wrote an essay, an article published in Harvard Business Review, quoting my main character about this matter. And some feminists and some cultural critics took this up. And then I thought, oh, well, maybe this has broader applications than just explaining this character to me. And so I began to think about it very seriously and to have to do lots and lots of interviews with people all over the place. Just I didn't think I would write a book about it. It seemed too broad, too mushy to tackle. And just I saw its implications everywhere, and that made me shy away from it. It was during COVID that I thought our society is really coming apart at the seams. We are fighting with each other over everything. Does this mattering instinct have something to do with this, this great existential need to prove to ourselves that we objectively matter?

James Hogson 5:50

During COVID, you sat down to decide to write it, particularly about how society is coming apart at the scenes.

Rebecca Goldstein 5:57

That we are just finding more and more ways of getting all worked up and angry and hostile. What is going on? And I do think that the closeness of death, this uncontrollable at this point virus was sweeping through us. We didn't know how to how to fight it, and it made us feel so vulnerable. And clinging all the more to whatever we felt convinced us that yes, our lives have mattered. This was not for waste. This was not for nothing, this life that might be stuffed out at any moment. I think it intensifies that.

The magical mass meaning of 'matter'

James Hogson 7:01

Yes. And it's it, as you say, it's soft and mushy, so it's the opposite of physical matter. We're talking this is the other side of matter.

Rebecca Goldstein 7:08

Yes. That word matter in English is so rich, it's so amazing, that I can sum up what I think our species is. We are creatures of matter who long to matter. And one of the strongest manifestations of this is people who deny that we are matter.

James Hogson 7:29

Yeah.

Rebecca Goldstein 7:30

Like, because how could we truly matter if all we are is matter? So I mean you can express this in English quite nicely.

James Hogson 7:38

Yes, yeah, yeah. It's a nice coincidence that you have the the word has that dual meaning for sure. And I think you mentioned early on that it's it

Longing, resistance, entropy and agency

James Hogson 7:45

is one of the, if not the core differentiators of us with the rest of the animal kingdom, this longing to matter. So what do you see are the roots of this need for humans?

Rebecca Goldstein 8:00

Yes. So should I go all the way back to entropy?

James Hogson 8:06

Please start with entropy, because I I that chapter was yeah, was fascinating.

Rebecca Goldstein 8:10

So so yes, entropy is and I you don't have to believe me about this. You can believe people like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. It is the supreme law of physics. It is the law of physics. We know that no matter what we go on to discover, we'll never be falsified. That is only true of this law. And I try to somewhat explain this. It so much depends on the just the mathematics of probability, entropy. But entropy is, you know, that things go toward chaos, toward disorder. If you leave your house for several months, you come back, there's dust all over. There is disorder. That is the natural tendency of things that go towards this disorder. And all the laws of biology really are derivable from this. It's resistance to entropy. Life demands order. And so all biological systems have to take in great amount of energy to resist entropy, and they they create entropy, it's dissipated into the environment. So I like to tell my students, life makes a mess, some lives more than others, and we make a great deal of mess, our our species, and some among us make more mess than others. Anyway, so this is true of all life. The resistance to entropy, which demands for those creatures who have attention, a tremendous amount of attention focused on the self, you know, on one's own well-being and flourishing. We are the creatures because of these amazing objects that we carry around in these craniums, this most sophisticated object that has yet been discovered in the universe, this brain, comes with a capacity for self-reflection, that we can step outside of ourselves and regard ourselves with some degree of objectivity and ask, am I truly deserving of all this attention? Which I absolutely have to, by the laws of nature, it just comes automatically by default. I have to lavish on myself incessant attention. Who am I to devote so much of my attention to myself? If the measurement of how much one thinks something matters, which I tend to think means deserving of attention, that's the measure of how much I think something matters is how much attention I devote to it. It would follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe. And short of lunacy, none of us think that, right? This is that extra self-reflective, justificatory aspect that comes into being a human that supplies us with this existential dimension. So this is pretty great that we humans have this. We want not only to automatically feel that we are of value, we want somehow to prove it to ourselves. And I would go so far as to say, since I don't believe in any kind of transcendent being who gives us value, that we're bringing, just by this question, by being human, by this self-justificatory question, we're bringing values into the universe. That's pretty damn good. Hooray for us, hooray for the human species. They could be very bad values. Yes. But nevertheless, they're something estimable.

James Hogson 11:51

And we'll come back to that, I think, when we dive into the mattering map for sure.

Rebecca Goldstein 11:55

Exactly.

James Hogson 11:56

But I really liked this framing in the book of mattering as resistance to entropy and our sort of knowledge of that and our own it becomes from our self-awareness and our our desires. But I'm interested, you mentioned COVID earlier, and I think one of the other reasons why we saw this kind of breakdown in society for a lot of people was the realization that no one was in control. And I think that's very closely tied again to entropy. This was a a natural phenomenon which we tried to, and eventually, of course, we did manage to get a grip on as a society. But again, this is why we had a lot of conspiracy theories, you had a lot of anti-science coming out, you had a lot of, and you say there was this tearing apart of society because people wanted to associate blame and they were scared. And it really came from that lack of control. Do you see a connection between mattering and a the desire for mattering and a desire to have some level of control over our lives?

Rebecca Goldstein 12:53

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yes, no, absolutely. It's very they're very tied up with each other. This whole self-reflective step that we can take, it is we have a conception of ourselves. We have a conception of ourselves as agents. And that is so important for our sense of mattering, that we are the agents of our actions. We are yeah, so very, very much tied together.

Spinoza and striving

James Hogson 13:22

And I was pleased to see uh very prominent atheist Spinoza plays quite a large role in the book as well. What can Spinoza teach us about mattering?

Rebecca Goldstein 13:33

Yeah, so two ways, I think. So I taught Spinoza for many years. It is my favorite thing to he certainly my favorite historical philosopher to teach. And it's a voyage with the class to bring them through what seems an impenetrable and totally impersonal work, the ethics, his magnum opus, and to see what happens when they start to make their way into it and how it changes them. It's interesting. He, of course, wanted to put ethics on a purely secular grounding, and we called his magnum opus the ethics, right? And so this was the great work that ceded the Enlightenment. And you know, it took 100 years, but he became a major figure during the Enlightenment. So but the grounding of ethics on something objective, not on different people's views about what this supernatural deity wants from us. But he also, in the course of trying to derive his ethics, and it is, of course, ambitiously claims to be a deductive work, to start with certain premises and then to deduce a la Euclid theorems ending with ethics. So a very strong claim that you can deduce aught from is. But he introduces this concept of conitas, which is this striving to persist in a thing's own being and to flourish, a striving to persist and to thrive. To survive and to thrive, to actually. And it's almost as if he implicitly knew that there was a force, which we now know how to name, entropy, against which we must constantly be striving, and that requires so much attention and energy. And so that was very, very important to me, and it plays a very important role in his derivation, this conitas, that there's a striving, and that's what the emotions are all about. Trying to assess how well this striving is going in our lives. When I hate something, it's because it's militating against my survival and flourishing. When I love something, it's it's it's encouraging my stuff. This conitas is very important. So that was interesting to me. He almost had the concept. Lurking behind this is something against which we must struggle. And we now know how to name that entropy. So there's that, and there's also that his great conviction that we can find a way of grounding ethics that we can all agree on because it's going to be something objective, something in the universe, not some something that we speculate about. And yeah, so those were, I think, the the two ways that, and I don't know if I hadn't spent all those years, you know, in the Spinoza mindset, whether I would have come to think see entropy in exactly this light. Oh, this is the thing lurking in the background. This explains so much about us.

James Hogson 16:48

Yeah, and that focus on striving is so interesting, again, from a humanist point of view, because the Amsterdam Declaration, which again, you know, written in Spinoza's home country, where humanism is defined as as best it can be, continually returns to this point of striving, is that humans strive humanists strive to be rational. We strive to find meaning. And I think it's such an important word, and but I think the way you've laid it out there really explains why it's such a humanist ethic to strive, and as you say, striving against entropy, but also not claim that to ever have got there, but for it to to be a constant struggle against the natural forces.

Rebecca Goldstein 17:29

Yeah. But and so we have to do this, and it's really can be derived, you know, we're biological creatures, and biology is really living creatures' answer to entropy. Of course, we're gonna lose the struggle. All things will. The universe itself will lose, right? The universe itself will end in a state of maximum entropy. But meanwhile, we struggle, and sometimes the struggle is good and sometimes it's not so good.

James Hogson 17:59

Aaron Ross Powell

Boltzmann's tragic need for recognition

James Hogson 18:00

And on the universe, I was also intrigued to hear a physicist, I believe, or certainly a a scientist in Boltzmann being again quite a big part of the story. So um, yeah, could you explain how Boltzmann has contributed to the our concept of mattering?

Rebecca Goldstein 18:20

Well, I mean, Boltzmidge is a tragic thing. I love tragic figures. That's a novel, probably. But people who it Spinoza is one and Boltzmann is another, who presented their ideas too soon. It took their peers, the rest of humanity, a long time to catch up. Um Spinoza, yeah, took a really long time to catch up. I think we're still trying to catch up with Spinoza, and we humanists are we are the descendants of Spinoza. Baltzman. Baltzman explained entropy. He really explained what is going on here. Why is there this tendency toward chaos to unraveling, towards destruction? And how can evolution, which is um we evolved in greater and greater complexity, how can this be explained in the face of entropy? What is entropy all about? And there's this great, I don't know how how deeply you want me to quantify, but there's a great entropy means that processes are irreversible, right? So that if I crack an egg and scramble it up and make an omelet, if I were to film that and run it backwards, that would be ridiculous, right? Everybody would know this is but run backwards. This can only go in one direction. And beating up an egg is creating more entropy of the egg. It's less order. But on the microscopic level, if you just look at the molecules moving around, it's reversible. It's completely reversible. If you film it and you run it backwards, nobody could detect that it was run backwards. But the macroscopic is just composed of the microscopic. So how can irreversibility have come out of reversibility of the microscopic laws that are completely reversible? And he answered that. But it wasn't understood in his time. And he So here's another way, he felt like he didn't matter. He didn't get, you know, he knew he had solved a really important problem, but he felt like he didn't matter, that nobody would ever accept it, that he was not going to contribute to scientific knowledge, and that to his that his life had been a waste. And he ended up committing suicide. It there were two ways in which the Boltzmann story. He's really a very, I love Boltzmann very much. He's a very poignant figure, and he did this magnificent work, and he had told us that this is what he wanted to do. Some people feel like they matter because they have power and they have money, and that all he wanted was to contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge, and nobody recognized that he had. And yeah, it's not that he wanted status, he wanted to be a contributor. But to be a contributor, others must recognize your contribution. So it wasn't like the status, it wasn't the fame, it wasn't all that. It was to be a contributor.

James Hogson 21:37

And that sets us up nicely, as you say, because it really is as much about where the individual is looking for mattering as to how their life actually unfolds. And it for Boltzmann, he was just wasn't getting that recognition, that affiliation, the accreditation that he probably knew his work deserved, and the satisfaction of the work alone wasn't sufficient for him. And so I

Navigating the Mattering Map

James Hogson 22:01

think that sets up nicely to introduce the mattering map. So could you talk us through the different ways in which humans find and rate mattering?

Rebecca Goldstein 22:11

Yeah. So, you know, as I say, the germ of this went back to this fictional creature and uh character. And I was, you know, impressed by the fact that different people, that we all share this need to somehow prove to ourselves, right? It's really about ourselves, to be able to live in an easy relationship with ourselves, that we have to somehow be able to justify ourselves that we're living a meaningful life. And I think this is true even of the people who are living the most preposterously preposterous lives or evil lives. That yes, they too share this. To be human is to have this aspect. But we do it in such very different ways. And so, you know, I was just observing it. It's very, very interesting to me. Example, I was once sitting in a hotel lobby in Manhattan waiting for a friend who is habitually late. And a guy comes up to me this many years ago, comes up to me, he's pestering me, blah, blah, blah. This, all this stuff. You know, he's trying to pick me up. And so I started to talk to him about his life. What gives him the impetus to go on? What does he think his life is all about? It turned out he was, and it was the first time I had heard the this phrase, he was a pickup artist. This was what his life was about. He picked up women. He had his stats, he had his heroes. There were books on this, how to do it effectively. So this was where he was on the mattering map. This was what I called, you know, this was his mattering project. It was fascinating to me. So I just I talked to people about this. It's really interesting. And then I started to think during COVID when uh I was thinking, are there patterns here? So here's this pickup artist, here's Boltzmann, here's Spinoza, here's me, here's my my friends, novelists, thinkers, all sorts of people. The grandma who devotes herself to her children, bringing up her children, so whatever. Yeah, there are patterns. And I just, you know, I think this is again, it's an empirical hypothesis based on my over 40 years of talking to people about this, it's open to falsification. But so far, people have thrown things at me. I don't think I have found it falsified yet. So there are these four general strategies, I think. And I call them the transcenders, the heroic strivers, the socializers, and the competitors. And what I have found that when I bring up this mattering thing, whether I'm in a faculty meeting, you know, at Harvard, which has happened, or I'm talking to somebody who's trying to pick me up, how a person understands these questions tell me a lot about whether they're a transcender, a heroic striver, a competitor, or a socializer.

Transcenders

Rebecca Goldstein 25:02

I'll start with the transcenders, because I think for most of most of our history, at least since the axial age, when we had the leisure to think about this kind, these sort of questions, what is, you know, that life was stable enough that we could think about what are we living for, which happened beginning about 800 BCE to about 200 BCE, when all of the religious frameworks and Western philosophy were generated, that from ever since that most people have been transcenders. And that is what we humanists do not believe in, that there is some transcendent being, something metaphysical outside of space, time, and the laws of nature that created those laws of nature, created everything, created the physical order without and the moral order within. And that and created us purposefully and intentionally, and we have a role to play or we wouldn't be here. And that's what our lives are about. And those are transcenders. And I must say that the transcenders with whom I've spoken, and I know what it feels like to be a transcender because I was born into a very religious household, Orthodox Jewish. And so for the first 13 years of my life, this is the way I thought about my life, that transcenders have a very robust sense of mattering, right? You know, they matter to that whose mattering can't be doubted if it were to exist, that which created everything from nothing. So, short of lunacy, there is no greater sense of mattering than to be a transcender. And it's not surprising that so many people are. And transcenders with whom I have had long discussions, they said to me, I just don't understand what gets you out of bed in the morning. How can how can you feel like your life has any meaning? So that's interesting. And that's really interesting to me, right? It shows what we're not up against, but it explains. It explains some very deep difference between us non-believers and believers, and why it's yes, so emotionally fraught.

James Hogson 27:11

And why often we talk past each other as well. When you see a lot of these debates, there really is a disconnect, I think. And that's been put down to lots of things, but I think the mattering, viewing it through the let the lens of the uh what oh how people matter. Sorry, I think it paused there. Are you okay? Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, sorry, just pause for a second there. Beg pardon. Yeah, so yeah, when you watch debates on this, it it really is people talking past each other and it and viewing it through this sense of what matters or what where they think that sense of mattering comes from, you suddenly realize why there is this disconnect between, as you say, transcenders.

Rebecca Goldstein 27:50

And I think it could make us so much more effective if we understood this. This was also a great motivation. It's don't come at people with you these abstract arguments and that it's make them feel stupid that we're so much. But that nothing will get the defenses up more than that. But come to them if our come to all of us, our shared humanity. That this longing that we all have to prove to ourselves is shared. And and yes, so that was to me so important because I've been in debates, I've been, we knock against each other, it's horrible.

James Hogson 28:32

Is it a s purely a sense of service or is there more to it? Like service to the greater good, greater power?

Rebecca Goldstein 28:44

I couldn't possibly be here unless I have a role to play in the narrative of eternity, right? And that's crazy from my point. That's but what a sense of mattering. And so it's no wonder that you know, that transgenders will say to me, I just I just don't understand how you pursue your life. What gives you what keeps you going? And I think it's just really important to to get in touch with that. I I'm happy that I was born into the family that I was born into, because I really know what that feels like. And I know what it felt like when I decided I could no longer believe in this. But it was like, okay, so what do I do with my life now?

James Hogson 29:29

If you don't mind me asking then, looking back, do you think there was an immediate replacement sense of mattering that you could step into? Or was that then a sense of searching for where, but even though you probably you you hadn't come up with the theory yet, but do you think you did go through a process, the go through the process of thinking, okay, where am I finding meaning and mattering in life?

Rebecca Goldstein 29:51

Yeah, no, I think I didn't have the language, of course. I was 13 or 12, something like that. I didn't have the language for it. But but yeah, there was a sense that the universe was less than I thought it was, and that I was less therefore also than I thought I was. But the universe seemed drained for me for quite some time. I felt like it was less than I had thought, and less beautiful even. I came to think entirely differently. It's all the more beautiful because it is explained by the laws of nature. How beautiful is that. That that is. But but yeah, there was that almost almost depression, almost, I don't know, or hopelessness or something.

James Hogson 30:42

Are they not are they non non-religious transcendent mattress?

Rebecca Goldstein 30:46

Spiritual, but not religious, right. That there's actually an acronym for it now. But that the the mannering is out there in the universe. It's some kind of metaphysics. And so I'm careful to distinguish it from yes, we can experience this sense of transcendence, a starring height, or art can do it, this sense of being in touch with something greater than one selves. But for transcenders, because I'm very interested in how people go about just justifying their own life, their sense of meaning. The transcenders I reserve for those who have some sort of metaphysical transempirical belief. It's ontological. Mattering is ontological, it's out there, it's not just the psychological experience of feeling in touch with something greater. I get that when I read a beautiful mathematical proof or something that's like, oh, transcendence, utter beauty, or Boltzmann's explanation of entropy. There's,

Socialisers

Rebecca Goldstein 31:49

I feel like transcendence, but not in that ontological metaphysical sense, which we humanists are. We reject that. So we humanists are not transcenters.

James Hogson 32:00

So with the other the the other three broad categories of tra of matter matterers, would we call them?

Rebecca Goldstein 32:07

Well, matterers are humans, really. Socializers are most people understand mattering is mattering to others. When I ask that question, they will often by default supply that that prepositional phrase to others. And it is we are social creatures. We are gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures. And yeah, we need to have people in our lives to whom we matter, whether we deserve it or not. That's what my family is. That's what my friends are. They're not j judging me. Will they pay attention to me? Do I deserve it? They will give me attention. They are my intimates, they are in my life, colleagues sometimes, this sort of thing. But and so in that sense, we're all socializers, but just by by being gregarious creatures and helpless graves, we suffer a very long period of helplessness. A giraffe is born, it's immediately struggling to stand up. It's we take six months to figure out how to roll over. So we are very, we're what's called altrucial. It's a long period of dependency on others. And that's also due to our great big brains. Um if it's hard enough to get these brains out of the birth canal, they so they come out very early, with only a third of them, their normal capacity formed, and it takes until the upper 20s or the lower 20s for the last bit, the adult bit, to finally come at taking responsibility for one's own actions. But I reserve the term socializers for those who go about this existential dimension that we have by their relationships with others. So to have this relationship with yourself, you need a certain these certain relationships with others. The two things are collapsed. And there are two, there are so many distinct distinctions. It can be relationships with the people who are already in your life, but it could be with total strangers. And I've spoken to a lot of people, especially millennials, who really see what mattering is as being famous. They want to be paid attention to by a bunch of strangers. That's what it is to be a celebrity. And that is what they feel will answer this existential need. If a lot of strangers are paying attention to them, then clearly they deserve their own attention. This also comes in many different shapes and flavors that that socializers maybe we could just pause there on that as well, just to draw that out.

James Hogson 34:56

Because I I wanted to come to this later, but I think it's perfect time to raise it. And you mentioned earlier, obviously, about we we started talking about the period during COVID when everybody became kind of hyper online. Social media was around before, but it seems like it's taken off in a long way. And as you say, a lot of now mattering is attached to, as you say, these parasocial relationships and the numbers and quantities rather than the quality of relationships. But I feel like a lot of that is now geared, particularly to news media, but also social media, is telling people they don't matter. If you are not one of these, if you are not in the top 1%, then you don't matter. Do you feel like is that a new development or through social media?

Rebecca Goldstein 35:36

It certainly has exacerbated it, right? It has something to do with capitalism. But that there is a a mattering scheme of that there are some people who matter more than others, the the very wealthy, the very powerful, the very famous, often wrapped up into one and the same people. Elon Musk or something. And so this is and this we all, no matter who we are, we belong to matter. And for this to be out there, that mannering belongs to the very few, and that most of us can't can't even we can't get there. We we're not going to be very rich. We're not going to be we c maybe famous by for a few minutes on Twitter or something like that, but it's it causes tremendous dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction. Delilo had this beautiful line, the novelist DeLillo done Delilo in one of his books, that longing on a large scale is what makes history. And I think this is especially true for the longing to matter. Longing to matter on a large scale. When you have people longing to matter and they can't possibly they can't possibly matter given what's put out there, it makes history. I think it's made history very much in the United States. It's ripe for demagogues. Yeah, I am yours, I am your vengeance. For people who have been made to feel that they can't even aspire to matter. But also explains a lot about cults. And they cults can be religious, they can be political, they can be a terrible combination of both political and religious. I the the cult leader matters more than everybody else. And to the

Heroic Strivers and Competitors

Rebecca Goldstein 37:22

sense that you're his follower, you matter. There's two trickle-down mattering. So it can explain so much about what goes wrong when our society. Yeah. So yeah, totally 100% agree with you.

James Hogson 37:35

You've been very generous with us with your time, but I'd love to get the quick explanation of the final two mattering categories.

Rebecca Goldstein 37:44

Yeah. Heroic strivers. It was not mattering to God, it's not mattering to other people. Certain standards of excellence, Boltzmann was a great example, a standard of excellence that you want to maybe not satisfy, but to approach, to asymptotically get closer and closer to could be these standards may be intellectual, they may be artistic, they may be athletic, they may be moral. Some of the people that I that I profile are atheists who are in some, they're secular sites. They try to do is they strive to be better and better moral people. But the the this is what it is to be a heroic striver. It doesn't have to be, you don't have to break records or a it has to be a striving for you, perfecting yourself because you have something that you think matters, knowledge, beauty, prog justice. And that's and you are trying to fulfill this in order to be able to live in an easy relationship with yourself. And that's briefly what I mean by a heroic striver. And competitors are those who understand mannering. It's really interesting. They are the people who think that mannering is zero sum. To the extent that some matter, they matter less. They must matter more. They understand. They were the people who always became a little uncomfortable when I broached the subject because they hear it as mattering more than. And yeah, uh once again, we have certain political leaders who are clear competitors, right? They must matter more than in everything. One of them can't even accept that he ever lost an election because then he'd be a loser. Somebody would matter more than him. So it's like it's so out there with certain people. One very brief story, even competitors who can be a pain to work with, but they can make great contributions. And there is this guy I know. I had he's an acquaintance, he's a scientist, he's a very he stood, he's a very good scientist, he won a Nobel Prize. Another friend of who who knows him better than I said to me, I'll call him X, X was happy for all of 15 years in

Nature, nurture, and happiness

Rebecca Goldstein 40:01

his 15 minutes in his whole life. There were 15 minutes when he was happy. When? When he got that call from Stockholm, why was it only 15 minutes? Because then he realized other people had also gotten the Nobel Prize. So he still had to Yes, it's an exaggeration, but it really captures what a competitor is. It's hard to be a competitor.

James Hogson 40:22

And how much of this do you feel, because it seems to be slightly that there's obviously different motivations behind them. How much do you think where we fall on the mattering map is in our nature and innate versus nurture? Because for competitors, that sounds like a deep probably linked to the dark triad personality trait. But for the others, perhaps I wonder if it's more to do with our surroundings and the people that we respect growing up?

Rebecca Goldstein 40:47

Yeah, but I think also with our our talents, our passions, our temperament, I'm the only one.

James Hogson 40:56

It's been very good.

Rebecca Goldstein 40:58

Um I love it. Yeah, I'm the only one in my family who's not a transcender. I was brought up to be a transcender. All the people I most loved as I was growing up, and I revered my father, were transcenders. And I why I couldn't. I couldn't continue to believe in that. It's like a mind I was born with with whatever. So it's tricky, but it's real, it's so individual. It is how we go about this. And of course we can change it in the course of our lives. It's a hard thing to change, it's an extremely hard thing to change, but sometimes it's not working for us. We do not it's not contributing to our flourishing. And sometimes it's we realize it's not contributing to the flourishing of others that might matter to us, one hopes it would, or that we that we could be of more value to the world if we changed our location on the mattering map. So it's hard to be, you know. The friend of mine said he was going to get me a bunch of t-shirts to give out that says it's hard to be human. And I think that is also something for us humanists to really bear in mind. It's hard. Yeah.

James Hogson 42:05

And with that, do you what do you think is the relationship between mattering and happiness or fulfillment in life?

Rebecca Goldstein 42:16

Yeah, and happiness. Yeah, I I prefer the sort of uh notion of eudaimonia from the ancient Greeks, this this notion of flourishing, of well, that I think it's very tied with our dealing with our mattering instinct in a good way, at least for us. And and and that could, depending on how you go about it, require a great deal of frustration, of disappointment, of a sense of failure. Heroic strivers, right, can often go through tremendous sense of disappointment, of frustration. Parents of young children, for example, their episodic happiness, that feeling of that buoyant feeling when the endorphins are flowing, it that might really go down. But when you ask them, would you trade your life for a life without children, the oh the majority, even though their happiness has gone down, will say no. There are studies that show this to be true. So that that's because they feel that what they're doing matters, that this the raising these children to be flourishing individuals matter. And they would not do away with this, even though, oh my God, if you hear that shark song one more time, you're gonna commit suicide. It's just, oh, you may not have that shark song in England.

Changing minds

Rebecca Goldstein 43:37

A lot of Winds Mattering Project may require boredom, all sorts of unpleasant experiences. So not so much happiness, but that sense of meaningfulness, flourishing, eudaimonia.

James Hogson 43:49

And yeah, I think for that reason this book is essential reading for all humanists, if not all humans. So again, it's the mattering instinct, how our deepest longing drives us and divides us. Thank you once again, not just for this, Rebecca, but for your all of your contributions. It's been a real honor to speak with you. And before we go, we have our standard closing question, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what prompted that change?

Rebecca Goldstein 44:19

Yeah, I actually this work, uh one of the things I I most changed my mind about is was if it's transcenders. That I have more uh sympathy uh f for them, and I think if society offered more ways that there would be enough mattering to go around, which would be a a big change, that that perhaps there won't be as many uh transcenders, but uh the way in which we ought to talk to religious believers, and I've really I would never ever commit to a public debate again, this kind of tug of war. That's a big change for me. And it's to understand it's not just it's not that they're not getting it, and how can they be convinced by these weak arguments? It's not really about arguments, it's really about mattering. So I I could I've really changed my mind about that.

James Hogson 45:29

Rebecca Goldstein, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.

Rebecca Goldstein 45:33

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

James Hogson 45:35

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